


Nights Like This (Dovetail)

by detuned_radio



Category: America's Suitehearts - Fall Out Boy (Music Video), Fall Out Boy
Genre: America's Suitehearts (Music Video), Angst, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Kinda, Los Angeles, M/M, Poetic, Trippy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 12:48:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13570893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/detuned_radio/pseuds/detuned_radio
Summary: Every night like this dovetailed into the next, too addictive to abnegate, and if it meant the city would crumble every time, so be it.





	Nights Like This (Dovetail)

**Author's Note:**

> this is hardly even prose

It started on Hollywood Boulevard, as it often does. Through the streets and scaling skyscrapers, burning without heat or light, but the smoke, suffocating and silencing like a hand over the mouths of every mask, caged up thoughts in the confines of pretty heads. Hollywood Hills felt it soon after, and collagen traps snapped shut to allow it to pass.

The cameras kept flashing--they never really stopped. You’d have to learn to let them slip your mind, distress signals in flashing light so commonplace you’d end up welcoming the familiar phosphenes. 

Through the haze and flashes, the carousel clunked onward, rusting machinery under wood and metal caked with peeling paint cursed to immortality. 

It was days like these that Dr. Benzedrine would be slumped on the carousel’s floor, guitar slipping and fingers picking lazily at strings. Days like these, Sandman would be silent, sprawled on Benze’s lap while the sky twisted and contorted above him as he revolved. Horseshoe Crab tended to keep playing, his energy seemingly non depletable, while Donnie would be tapping out some sort of rhythm in sync with the mechanical whines of protest from the carousel.

And everyone could tell when Sandman was suffocated and silenced, when the city’s lights would start dying out and the blood in his veins would get more and more viscous, flowing slower and slower. It was days like these that Dr. Benzedrine would take over, asking in soft tones what he needed. He seemed to be the only one tuned onto the same wavelength, an open channel between the two of them. 

Being a doctor, he’d deal out the pills, each its own person, some that, by acquaintance, Sandman had become quite familiar with over the years. Adapin, Elavil, Lamictal, Norpramin, Vivactil, those among others, were names he came to know. Of course, like most, they wore their synthetic skins, and only through all the time he’d spent with them had he peeled that away, seen through the fake personalities and counterfeit charisma--Doxepin, Amitriptyline, Lamotrigine, Desipramine, Protriptyline. Ativan had held his trust for a long time, but every time they met it seemed he’d need her a little more, until she could take him apart piece by piece. Percocet didn’t visit often, but when she did the infatuation would be short but intense. Amphetamine was a constant, and one he probably trusted the most; there’d be headaches and nosebleeds, but there would also be that rush of euphoria.

Days like these were the ones that would end in surrender and retreat to a hotel room. When Dr. Benzedrine would take him by the hand to coerce him through tight crowds and flashing cameras, to where packed roads offered a whole new cacophony to escape from. And escape they would, somewhere seemingly repellant to energy where heat and light hardly infiltrated, a room where each speck of dust was motionless and the wooden floorboards would give underneath you sometimes without a single sound. 

In the room that didn’t breath, they’d lay supine on the bed, dead and alive in Schrodinger’s gamble as time stayed suspended. They’d drift closer together throughout the perpetual night until tangled limbs turned into syncytial cadavers. Half-dead until dawn saw them through.

Nights like this, there wasn’t much of a rush for dawn to see them through. Maybe the earth would stop spinning and the City of Angels would never see the light of day again, temperatures plunging lower and lower until the angels froze and the other side of the earth watched hell rise to the surface as calefaction brought about uninterrupted dog days.

Nights like this, When Sandman couldn’t surrender to the stillness enough to sleep, he’d find himself slipping out of the room, back to reality, watching the clockwork city tick through its motions, small remnants of sound reaching him at this altitude, the air warmed and wet with humidity riding updrafts from the Pacific. Suspended stories into to the sky, he'd wallow in the irony of his wakefulness. 

Nights like these when he’d feel arms around him from behind, and suddenly, with a hard pulse radiating through every vein, blood would begin flowing regularly again. Nights when his jaw would unlatch and let him say something. “The air’s cleared,” was his observation.

He felt Dr. Benzedrine nod and the arms pressing into his ribs increase their pressure. “Are you better than earlier?”

“A bit.”

“I’m glad you’re speaking to me.”

Sandman’s gaze not only fell, it plummeted, dozens of meters onto the roads, subsisted on flashing lights, periodic injections, who knew what else. “Sorry if I wasn’t. You know how I--”

“I know how you get,” he nodded a small increment, and Sandman could feel it between his shoulder blades. “Suffocated, right?”

“Trapped in my head,” he replied. “It builds up.”

“Hey,” a tap at his shoulder, coaxing him that direction. He turned and was met with a small smile. “That’s why we’re here.”

The smile was reciprocated--poorly, but it was a valiant effort. “I know. Thank you” was uttered in a low tone that walked the boundary of speech and whisper.

On nights like this, he’d cast a final glance behind him at the city. A last analysis, still wondering whether the grass was greener on the other side. It never was, and maybe it was insanity that kept him looking over his shoulder even when he already knew what he’d find, but as unavailing as it was, this vicious circle was an infinite loop. What he saw, every time, was the same feeling caged in his own mind, the one that couldn’t be domesticated. The feeling that was hard to describe, one bred of solemn loneliness, perhaps a hiraeth of sorts. The feeling evoked by a distant train whistle--there was a word for it, he was fairly certain, in German, although it slipped his mind now--the wave of bittersweet nostalgia and aching solitude beckoned by the sound of the forlorn cry. Similar to that, but perhaps more afraid. And then he’d hate every bright light and every passing car and every sound of the city settling, until he had to look back.

He’d look back. He would every time, and whiskey brown would meet baby blue laced in gold, and he’d want that to himself. Irises were eclipsed and distance was closed as one pair of lips closed over another, and the familiar ecstacy drowned his senses. Every light in the city went out and every building crumbled, concrete disintegrating to leave the bare wire skeletons of the building to either collapse under their own weight or support the framework on rusty steel beams. His pulse was pounding in his skull with renewed vigor, his skin was buzzing, and every nerve was on fire with overstimulation. When lips parted to open terrain for the other, he could smell the ferrous redolence, taste it on his lips, knew they were stained with it. 

Nights like this, the nosebleed wouldn’t stop, but neither would the two of them. Stumbling into the suite, dead and alive and addicted to every sensation. Every night like this dovetailed into the next, too addictive to abnegate, and if it meant the city would crumble every time, so be it.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks!! comments are appreciated ;O


End file.
